10 SEO First Steps for New Webmasters

Are you a webmaster who’s in desperate need of some SEO first steps? Then read an awesome article written by Aaron Agius!

When you consider that 75% of web users never go beyond the first page of search results, it’s imperative that your site has high visibility for search terms related to your industry.

Given the monetary incentive of ranking highly, it’s no surprise that search engine optimization is a thriving industry.

However, the SEO world can seem mystifying if you’re on the outside looking in.

Because things change so rapidly in SEO, it’s hard to get a grasp on what practices you should currently be undertaking in order to improve your ranking.

Not so long ago, keyword stuffing was a commonly used practice that enabled webmasters to game Google’s algorithm.

Nowadays, keyword stuffing will get you penalized.

Among the confusion, one trend is clear:

Google rewards sites that provide value to people. By delivering high quality content and striving to improve your user experience, you’ll remain in Google’s good books – that much is certain.

Although SEO should always be looked at as an ongoing process (rather than a quick fix solution), there are a number of steps you should take as soon as you launch a new site, so that it’s optimized from the very start to bring in organic traffic and rank well for niche keywords.

With the ultimate goal of making your site a great place to visit (for both desktop and mobile users), you can implement the following SEO steps to achieve this.

1 – Set up Analytics

While it might not seem like the most important thing to do straight away, setting up Google Analytics should be one of the first actions you take as a new webmaster.

Once you start generating traffic to your website, you’re going to want to know what blog posts are most popular with your audience, which websites are referring the most traffic, which geographic regions are sending you traffic, and what percentage of visitors are going on to become paying customers.

Without Google Analytics (or another sophisticated form of analytics software, depending on what’s available from your web host) in place, it’s impossible to know whether or not your marketing is working or failing.

And if things aren’t going as planned, analytics can help you to identify the specific problem so you can improve.

Create Case Studies

If your case studies are useful and informative, they’re likely to receive an abundance of inbound links (if you promote them correctly.)

Review Books

Publish a review of a book in your industry as a blog post, then reach out to the author on social media. Oftentimes, authors are excited to link to positive reviews of their work.

Create Infographics

Infographics are one of the most shareable forms of content. Creating a high value infographic, publishing it on infographic directories and promoting it using social media can result in an enormous amount of inbound links.

Create Free Resources

Can you think of an excellent resource that would provide huge value to people in your niche? If you publish a useful spreadsheet, checklist or eBook and promote it correctly, this will generate inbound links.